Raiders of the Lost City

Published: July 22, 2010

Last week, workers at the World Trade Center site discovered a 30-foot section of an 18th-century ship, buried about 20 to 30 feet below street level. It's a remarkable find, but hardly a first for New York. Since the late 1970s, hundreds of archaeological digs around the city have uncovered thousands of artifacts and structures -- each of which have helped to shape our understanding of New York's history. The Op-Ed editors asked 12 local archaeologists to share their most memorable discoveries.

Tannery
Foley Square
Maps show that in the 18th century the Collect Pond, which sat on the north side of Foley Square but was filled in around 1815, was home to the city's tanning industry -- but there were no artifacts to prove it. In 1995, though, I determined that subtle changes in the soil composition under the square were probably caused by rotted bark and organic mats, items that were used in the tanning process. Subsequent excavations yielded goat horns from discarded carcasses and tanning hooks, evidence that tanneries had in fact been on the site.
-- JOSEPH SCHULDENREIN,
archaeological consultant

Almshouse
City Hall Park
This 18th-century building, located earlier this year, was the city's first poorhouse. Thousands of artifacts were found, including coins, pottery and a skeleton key -- evidence that before the grand City Hall went up in the early 19th century, the neighborhood was occupied by the poor and prisoners, some of whom were American soldiers who were captured during the Revolutionary War.

--ALYSSA LOORYA,
archaeological consultant

Row house foundations
7 Hanover Square
Digging along the east side of Pearl Street in 1981, my colleagues and I uncovered the well-preserved foundations of a row of houses from the late 17th century. It was only the second block of houses excavated in Lower Manhattan, and it yielded a trove of artifacts from the city's earliest days -- including a ceramic crucible, proof that a silversmith may have once worked there.
-- ARNOLD PICKMAN,
archaeological consultant

Battery wall
Battery Park
We discovered this wall in four sections, built in 1741 and 1755, during the 2005 excavations for the new South Ferry subway station. Long buried by history, it was thrilling to find such a large intact artifact that had been part of everyday life over 250 years ago.
-- LINDA STONE,
archaeological consultant

Lovelace Tavern
85 Broad Street
During the city's first large formal archaeological exploration, in 1979, we uncovered the foundations, the floor and many artifacts from Lovelace Tavern, built in 1670. The discovery included a remnant of a barrel containing many intact (but empty) wine bottles. The tavern wasn't just a site for socializing; it served as New York's second city hall. The foundations were preserved and can now be seen on the plaza of the former Goldman Sachs building.
-- NAN A. ROTHSCHILD,
professor at Barnard College

Teacup
Between Front and South Streets
In a large box, probably a privy, that we located in 1984, we found broken dishes, glass and bones, as well as a piece of a Chinese porcelain teacup with a faint monogram: ''CVB.'' It likely stood for Courtlandt Van Beuren, a specialty grocer and sachem of the Tammany Society, who lived in a house there in the early 19th century. It is one of the very few cases in which a person has left such a direct archaeological signature.
-- META F. JANOWITZ,
archaeological consultant

Scuttled ship
175 Water Street
Sometime between 1737 and 1746, the owners of five East River water lots used a ship, which had been scuttled along the shore, to create the outer edge of a new block. We discovered it in 1981 and while it was not the first ship found in a Manhattan landfill, it was the first to be fully excavated, providing a unique example of colonial engineering.
-- JOAN H. GEISMAR,
archaeological consultant

Ritual bath
5 Allen Street
During a 2001 excavation, we uncovered a luxurious turn-of-thecentury bathhouse with a 20-foot swimming pool as well as a 6-foot-by- 6-foot ritual pool, or mikvah. Rabbi Nochum Rosenberg examined the pool and declared its construction ''kosher,'' making it one of the oldest known mikvahs in New York and the first discovered in archaeological excavations in the city.
-- CELIA BERGOFFEN,
adjunct professor at the Fashion Institute of Technology

Plow furrows
Sheridan Square
During a 1982 dig, my colleagues and I were surprised to discover a well-preserved series of dark stains buried under several layers of soil -- unmistakable proof that one spring day, in the 18th or early 19th century, a farmer had been there plowing his fields. What is today a dense and vibrant urban neighborhood was, not long ago, a quiet country farm.
-- ANNE-MARIE CANTWELL,
professor at Rutgers University

Bottle fragment
King Manor, Jamaica, Queens
In 2004 I found this wine bottle fragment buried with the remains of an 18th-century structure that had been used by slaves. It was carved with an X. The mark is most likely a West African Bakongo cosmogram, a depiction of the universe -- strong evidence that Africans in New York preserved their ancestral communal beliefs despite their enslavement.
-- CHRISTOPHER MATTHEWS,
associate professor at Hofstra University